With their 4-1 loss to the Montreal Canadiens on Thursday evening, the 2024-25 Boston Bruins season goes from dangerous to worse. Not solely does that loss maintain them on the backside of the Jap Convention standings, it additionally prolonged their present shedding streak to 10 consecutive video games.
It’s now tied for the second-longest shedding streak in franchise historical past, and is their first 10-game shedding streak because the 2009-10 season.
They’re now only one loss away from tying the franchise document for longest shedding streak, and two away from setting a brand new mark for futility. The 1924-25 Bruins maintain that document, having misplaced 11 consecutive video games.
The Bruins’ upcoming schedule would appear to offer them a superb likelihood for at the least tying the mark as their subsequent recreation is on Saturday in opposition to a Carolina Hurricanes crew that is likely one of the greatest within the NHL.
They play at Buffalo on Sunday the place they might theoretically set the brand new franchise mark.
There ought to have been an expectation for the Bruins to take a step backwards this season, however not even the most important pessimist in Boston might have foreseen a season this dangerous.
They lacked a real No. 1 middle, didn’t have a deep roster at ahead or protection and misplaced a major a part of their goaltending benefit once they needed to commerce Linus Ullmark to the Ottawa Senators for wage cap functions. There have been indicators a 12 months in the past that the Bruins have been declining as a crew, particularly because it associated to their defensive metrics the place they have been one of many worst groups within the league at stopping scoring probabilities, however goaltending helped bail them out.
This season the goaltending just isn’t there, and all of their flaws are being uncovered.
With the Bruins now on the backside of the convention standings and shutting out the season with a whimper, it’s time to begin pondering what the long run is for normal supervisor Don Sweeney.
His offseason additions of Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov have flopped on huge contracts, he fired head coach Jim Montgomery who’s now main an unimaginable second-half flip round for the St. Louis Blues and traded crew captain Brad Marchand on the deadline with out even guaranteeing his crew a first-round decide in return.
The Bruins have been trending within the flawed path for a few years now, whereas they’ve failed to deal with their greatest want the previous two years (discovering top-line facilities to exchange the retired Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci). They’ve modified gamers, gone via a number of coaches and should not have any extra playing cards to play apart from a possible change at GM.
It could be time.
The one constructive that may come from this season is that with every loss they improve their draft lottery odds to doubtlessly add an affect participant on the high of the 2025 NHL Draft. That’s not what anyone in Boston anticipated for this season.
